Streaming applications are known in the art, and typically include multiple operators, or software analytic modules, coupled together in an operator graph that process data in near real-time. The operators are placed across multiple hosts, or nodes, in a distributed or cloud computing environment. The placement of the operators can be both user and runtime configurable. Typically, the placement of operators is done based on performance or resource requirements. A particular placement of an operator may involve potential security risks, such as in multi-tenant cloud deployments where multiple customers may share the same node, which may result in malicious operator placement configurations. These potential security risks, however, are not part of the conventional placement of operators done based on performance or resource requirements.